THE PLATFORMIZATION OF IDEOLOGY: HOW LEFT- AND RIGHT-WING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS PERFORM INTELLECTUAL WORK ON REDDIT

This thesis investigates the landscape of contemporary U.S. politics on social media platforms. Specifically, it studies left- and right-wing ideological groups on the platform Reddit with a focus on their efforts to make meaning from the 2020 George Floyd protests as they erupted across the country. These groups are sampled through a platform-wide, keyword-based search of Reddit during the period of protest and a qualitative coding for left- and right-wing ideology of top posts. My investigation into these groups is organized around three fundamental questions: (1) what platform affordances and moderation processes are used most often in the observed groups? (2) what frames and ideologies appeared most often in these groups’ discussions of the George Floyd protests? and (3) which groups were more successful at garnering engagement and building consensus through their use of Reddit? My investigation into these questions proceeds in three stages: first, I conduct a digital ethnography of groups identified through my sampling procedure; second, I conduct a critical discourse analysis on a set of top posts from these groups during the period of protest in 2020; and third, I employ quantitative analyses of post metrics from left- and right-wing groups to compare the engagement and consensus they were able to garner. Based on this analysis, I advance several claims. I argue first that left-wing groups on Reddit benefited disproportionately from their use of the platform, both in terms the engagement and the consensus they were able to garner. I argue further that this success is far more likely to be explained by Reddit’s approach to content moderation than it is to be explained by differing affordance use across groups, as some prior literature has posited. Finally, I argue more broadly that both sets of groups I observed on Reddit exhibit a form of intellectual work that should be considered novel to social media use and that I term cyborganic intellectualism. These findings have important implications for how we understand the impact of social media platforms on the circulation of politics and ideas in the United States.